970 Evo NVMe PCIe M.2 250GB

The 970 Evo is Samsung’s third generation NVMe PCIe SSD for high-end consumers and professionals alike. It employs the latest Samsung Phoenix controller and their latest version of TLC 3D NAND (now 64-layers) which is cheaper but with slightly lower endurance and weaker write consistency than the MLC NAND found in the 970 Pro. The 970 Evo comes in a M.2 form factor and four sizes: 250GB, 500GB, 1TB and 2TB. The $120 250GB 970 Evo has an advertised sequential read speed of up to 3400 MB/s (200MB/s faster than the 250GB 960 Evo) and a sequential write speed of 1500 MB/s which drops to 300 MB/s once the 13Gb of SLC cache has been exhausted (this is similar to the sustained write performance on the 960 Evo). Further benchmarks are required before we can attest to its overall performance in the real world. The anticipated modest performance improvement between generations is expected to maintain Samsung’s front running as the premium SSD brand. Samsung now offers a warranty of 5 years across the suite of 970 SSDs and specifically a generous write endurance of 150 TBW on the 250 GB 970 Evo, thereby challenging the need for the 970 Pro MLC variant. ^{[May '18 SSDrivePro]}